Some
little boys play with toy carsand later
grow up to be auto mechanics.

Some
little girls play with dollhousesand later
grow up to be homemakers.

This
little boy played with scoreboardsand later
grew up to be a graphics operator for sports telecasts.

It started
with the arrival at our house of the November 1960 issue of Friends,
a magazine for Chevrolet owners. This particular issue
included a two-page spread about the giant scoreboard at the Los
Angeles Coliseum.

As a
13-year-old, I pored over the details. The board, nine years
older than me, was still the largest in the world. It measured
24 feet high and 42 feet wide and contained 11,500 light bulbs.

Each bulb
occupied a three-inch square. These squares were arranged in a
matrix consisting of 70 rows and 164 columns (with an extra column on
20 of the rows). Since each character was seven bulbs tall,
this resulted in ten rows of 21-inch-high characters.

How far
away could 21-inch-high characters be seen? I ran a little
experiment. I found that I could read one-inch-high characters
easily from a distance of 17 feet, and I could still make them out
from 25 feet. Scaling up by a factor of 21, this gave a range
of about 350 to 525 feet for the Coliseum scoreboard. That
meant that the numbers were indeed big enough to be read from the far
end zone. I developed a general rule: the ratio of height
to distance should be no less than 1 to 300 and preferably 1 to 200.

The
article went on to explain how the board worked. Nowadays, of
course, it would be computerized. But when it was built in
1938, that technology wasn't available.

So a
miniature version was installed in a small room behind the big board.

On this
three-by-five-foot table were 11,500 sockets, each wired to one of
the bulbs outside. From a filing case, the operators selected
character blocks and inserted them into the panel. Each prong
lit a bulb.

To quickly
change numbers (like the down and the yards to go), there were
special gadgets, such as those being operated by the man on the far
right. I deduced that each had up to 33 prongs that could be
moved in and out of their circuits by the rotation of a wheel.

And there
were toggle switches for each row of type that could turn off the
entire row, such as the promo OCT.
5 UCLA VS OREGON,
until it was needed.

All other
scoreboards formed their characters out of simple rectangular arrays
of light bulbs.

The
Coliseum board was classier, because its letters had serifs. To
achieve this efficiently, the first and last of the seven rows were
simply shifted horizontally by half a bulb.

For some
reason, I found all of this fascinating. Perhaps from childhood
we're each predisposed to take an interest in what will become our
life's work.

At the
time, I was a manager for our eighth-grade basketball team. But
the Claibourne-Richwood junior high school was housed in the old 1917
school building on East
Ottawa Street, a building that had no gym. We had to hold our
basketball practices at the town hall three blocks away.

The gym at
this "Opera House" was on the second floor, with a locker
room half a floor above (outlined here in green). To reach it,
one had to climb a flight of iron steps on the outside of the
building. I recall that one of my duties was clearing the snow
from these steps.

The Opera
House facilities were Spartan and old-fashioned, as one might
imagine. But it did have a real Fair-Play scoreboard like the
one shown below.

I examined
it closely, noting how the white bulbs were set into a metal egg
crate that was covered with a sheet of dark red plastic. Again,
each number was seven bulbs high. I sketched other
possibilities and decided that the practical minimum was probably
five bulbs.

The coach,
Don Parsons, saw me making my measurements and offered to power up
the scoreboard so I could play with it, but I declined; I was on
duty, and "play" was not in my job description as a team manager.

The next
year, I was a Richwood High School freshman. This building
(which became North Union Junior High School after I graduated)
actually did have a gymnasium/auditorium. At freshman games, I
sometimes was assigned to operate the scoreboard, which had probably
been hanging on the wall since the high school was built in
1939. Here are two fuzzy photos.

The only
parts that lit up were the numerals 12 34 to indicate the
quarter. (Visitors sometimes would ask why the board seemed to
be showing a score of twelve to thirty-four.)

The analog
clock had a second hand plus a larger hand that went around once in
eight minutes, since that was the length of a high-school basketball
period. However, the JV team, then called "reserves,"
played six-minute quarters. We had to allow them a
two-minute break between periods so that we could run the clock forward.

As the
scoreboard operator, I had a small wooden box with switches for the
quarter lights, clock, and horn. There was a bundle of wires
coming out of it, of course, and there were also four pushbuttons for
the score.

The score
numerals were painted on four black disks, arranged so that one digit
at a time showed through the window above the team name.
Each pushbutton activated an electric motor. The attached disk
slowly turned 36° until it reached the next digit. There
it paused for a couple of seconds, then rotated to the next digit,
and so on, as long as I kept my finger on the button.

But if I
happened to give a point to the wrong team, it took almost a minute
to correct the mistake by rotating the disk all the way back around.

Even when
I did my job properly, there were complaints. After a basket
was scored, some fans might object that I had given their team only
one point. Just wait a few seconds, I wanted to say; another
point will be here soon.

Also, the
scoreboard was located out of the view of some of the fans, who sat
on bleachers erected on the stage nearby.

Despite
the drawbacks, I adapted this technology in a speculative design
for a larger scoreboard that could be used for football games.

But within
a couple of years, the Richwood Boosters purchased a modern
scoreboard with numbers that actually lit up, including a digital
clock! You can see it on the left of this 1965 photo of an
intramural game, with the old scoreboard still high on the wall at
the right.

The
new board was a huge improvement, although I noted that its
designers had cut corners slightly by using a matrix that was only
six bulbs high.

It was
colorful, though. There were amber 7½-watt bulbs for the
score, blue-green bulbs for the clock, and smaller red lights for the quarters.

Meanwhile,
I had discovered on television that there was an alternative to round
light bulbs. The rocket scientists at Cape Canaveral needed
only seven rectangular segments to form each digit on their countdown clocks.

So I got
out my Girder & Panel Construction
Set, which included a green Masonite board with holes into which pegs
could be placed.

As shown
in this drawing, I could insert red plastic "girders"
between the pegs to form numbers. To keep myself occupied while
listening to a basketball game on the radio, I'd rearrange the
girders to keep track of the score.

For
football games, I sometimes posted the numbers on a small blackboard,
including down and yards and so forth, using colored chalk. I
must have entertained myself this way on December 15, 1962, when the
Cleveland Browns ended their season at Kezar Stadium in San
Francisco. A month later, we moved to a new house, and the
blackboard ended up in the basement. I remember that the final
remained on the board for a long time afterwards: Browns 13,
49ers 10.

In
addition to the blackboard, I borrowed a clock: the electric
alarm clock from my parents' bedroom, seen here in another fuzzy
photo. It had a sweep second hand, and if I unplugged the
electricity, it stopped. I rigged up a switch so I could start
and stop the clock in response to the televised referee's signals.

Keeping
time and score was more fun than merely watching the game. In a
way, I was now involved. And this playing around eventually led
to my career in graphics for sports television.

In 1982, I
had already working in local cable TV for a dozen years. My
current job was with a company, TCS,
which had other interests as well: they had recently built a
remote broadcast truck and were starting to televise some Pittsburgh
Pirates games on regional cable. They needed some cheap
entry-level workers, and my boss, Tom Huet, asked whether I wanted to
learn to be an audio engineer for these broadcasts. I replied,
"Actually, that character generator looks more interesting to
me." Okay, he said, we'll show you how to run it.